As millions of Americans contemplate the long journey home after the holiday, it's easy to forget that the interstate highway system is a real miracle:

In an article in the Review of Economics and Statistics in
1994, Ishaq Nadiri and Theofanis Mamuneas looked at the impact of the
highway system. In all but three of the 35 industries they studied,
costs fell sharply—by 24 cents for each $1 invested in the
highways—thanks to easier and cheaper transport. As a result, the
authors reckoned, the highway system had a big impact on productivity.
During the late 1950s, they said, interstate-highway spending was
responsible for 31% of the annual increase of American productivity (at a
time when the economy was growing at 6% a year). Its contribution to
productivity growth obviously slackened over time, but in the 1960s was
still about 25%, before falling to 7% in the 1980s as the system neared
completion.

John Tarrant (Western Australia) has posted Obligations as Property (University of New South Wales Law Journal) on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

A
widely asserted proposition is that all property rights are rights in
rem and that rights in personam, such as debts and bank accounts, are
not property rights. The proposition was advocated by John Austin based
on his interpretation of Roman law. The obvious difficulty with the
proposition is that it is irreconcilable with the case law because a
number of cases from ultimate appellant courts confirm that debts are
property rights. The author examines relevant case law and
interpretations of Roman law to argue that the proposition that all
property rights are rights in rem is based on a misunderstanding of
Roman law. The author concludes that the assertion should be rejected as
erroneous. Debts in the form of money obligations owed by one person to
another are indeed property rights.

In honor of the holiday, it's fun to recap the argument that private
property saved the pilgrims. Benjamin Powell, an economist at Suffolk,
tells the story here:

Many people believe that after suffering
through a severe winter, the Pilgrims’ food shortages were resolved
the following spring when the Native Americans taught them to plant
corn and a Thanksgiving celebration resulted. In fact, the pilgrims
continued to face chronic food shortages for three years until the
harvest of 1623. Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause
the pilgrims’ shortages. Bad economic incentives did.

In 1620 Plymouth Plantation was founded
with a system of communal property rights. Food and supplies were held
in common and then distributed based on equality and need as
determined by Plantation officials. People received the same rations
whether or not they contributed to producing the food, and residents
were forbidden from producing their own food. . . . Because of the
poor incentives, little food was produced.

Faced with potential starvation in the
spring of 1623, the colony decided to implement a new economic system.
Every family was assigned a private parcel of land. They could then
keep all they grew for themselves, but now they alone were responsible
for feeding themselves. This change, [the Pilgrims recorded], had very
good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more
corn was planted than otherwise would have been. Giving people
economic incentives changed their behavior. Once the Plymouth
Plantation abandoned their communal economic system and adopted one
with greater individual property rights, they never again faced the
starvation and food shortages of the first three years.

This is a yarn that makes the property-lizard part of my brain start
tingling. However, it doesn't really explain how the Indians managed
to survive here for thousands and thousands of years.

Families that moved to safer and better-off areas "improved their health
in ways that were quite profound," including reductions in obesity and
diabetes, says Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who is principal
investigator of the project's long-run study. They showed less
depression, Katz says, and "very large increases in happiness." Yet the
program failed to improve other key measures, like the earnings and
employment rate of adults and the educational achievement of children.

Property
law has evolved and adapted throughout its existence in response to
social and technological change. In this era of increasing focus on
sustainable energy, new property rights disputes arising from
innovations in the energy industry are once again stretching the bounds
of property law. As novel energy strategies spread across the country,
they are raising complex property questions involving wind currents,
sunlight, deep underground mineral deposits, airspace, subsurface pore
space, and other resources.

Resource governance regimes that
reflect the unique characteristics of emerging energy technologies can
play a valuable role in the nation’s continued pursuit of energy
sustainability. Unfortunately, despite volumes of legal scholarship on
the evolution and structuring of property rights regimes, there is
little consensus among lawmakers or within the legal academy regarding
how best to adapt such regimes to modern energy innovation. Courts and
legislatures are increasingly feeling pressure to alter long-established
property arrangements to accommodate and encourage new forms of energy
development. At what point do these adjustments go too far, excessively
compromising fairness and efficiency goals in an effort to promote a
new energy strategy?

This short article, written for a joint
program of the Natural Resources and Energy Law and Property Law
Sections of the American Association of Law Schools at the Association’s
2013 Annual Meeting, offers some general guidelines for adjusting
property rights regimes to accommodate new energy innovations. This
article suggests that, when feasible, policy actions that merely clarify
ambiguities in existing law are often the simplest and most
cost-effective way to respond when important technological advancements
place pressure on longstanding property structures. When such policies
are inadequate or unavailable, the most equitable and efficient
adjustments to property arrangements tend to be those that respect
rather than disregard property owners’ existing entitlements.

One of my favorite essays about property (which has been given wide circulation by the Perspectives on Property Law reader) is Erving Goffman's look that how patients in mental institutions carve out little domains of private property for themselves. Goffman shows how even in highly controlled societies, people define themselves by their claims over things and spaces. Last week the website, collectorsweekly.com, posted an fascinating piece that helps the public visualize the actual property of asylum patients. Both the piece and the accompanying photos are worth a gander:

If you were committed to a psychiatric institution, unsure if you’d ever return to the life you knew before, what would you take with you? That sobering question hovers like an apparition over each of the Willard Asylum suitcases. From the 1910s through the 1960s, many patients at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane left suitcases behind when they passed away, with nobody to claim them. Upon the center’s closure in 1995, employees found hundreds of these time capsules stored in a locked attic. Working with the New York State Museum, former Willard staffers were able to preserve the hidden cache of luggage as part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Photographer Jon Crispin
has long been drawn to the ghostly remains of abandoned psychiatric
institutions. After learning of the Willard suitcases, Crispin sought
the museum’s permission to document each case and its contents. In 2011,
Crispin completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to
help fund the first phase of the project, which he recently finished.
Next spring, a selection of his photos will accompany the inaugural
exhibit at the San Francisco Exploratorium’s new location.

This book chapter proposes a bold sweeping set of characteristics of
"adaptive law": features of the legal system that promote the resilience
and adaptive capacity of both social systems and ecosystems. Law,
particularly U.S. law, has been characterized as ill-suited to
management of natural resources and the environment for resilience and
sustainability. The maladaptive features of U.S. law include narrow
systemic goals, mononcentric, unimodal, and fragmented structure,
inflexible methods, and rational, linear, legal-centralist processes.
This book chapter proposes four fundamental features of an adaptive
legal system: 1) multiplicty of articulated goals; 2) polycentric,
multimodal, and integrationist structure; 3) adaptive methods based on
standards, flexibility, discretion, and regard for context; and 4)
iterative legal-pluralist proceses with feedback loops and
accountability. It then discusses these four features in the context of
several socio-ecological issues and identifies needs for future study
and development of adaptive law, particularly in light of panarchy
theory about how complex, adaptive, interconnected systems change over
time.